All things that Suck, and a few things that are Awesome

Tag Archives: Cutscenes

My three year old daughter is on a Mario kick. I recently beat Super Mario Odyssey and she was there to witness the final battle and ending cutscene (which was marvelous). Her being a little gamer it’s no surprise that she’s fucking nuts about Princess Peach now. That’s all she talks about: “Dada I wanna save the Peach! I wanna save the Princess Peach!” Okay. So I thought it might be fun to hook up the Nintendo Wii so she can save “The Peach” in Super Mario Galaxy. After all it has motion controls and that will be fun and easy for a kid, right?

This isn’t about Mario though. What happened was I hooked up the Wii, she played a bit, and then wanted me to play. My game in Mario Galaxy was so far along that I didn’t feel like dicking around with the upper level stars that I had left. Coming back to games after awhile is hard because you’re not used to the difficulty curve anymore. You lost all points in GIT and GUD. Anyways, I decided to hop over to Twilight Princess and tried playing that trainwreck of a game. I had an older file where I had just beaten the first dungeon (forest temple? The Great Dickhead Tree? Idk.) and was headed to Kakariko Village. I was teleported back to wherever to find some stupid-ass bridge and I had zero patience to play that game anymore. More on that in a future post. So I tried starting a new game in Skyward Sword.

Skyward Sword was a Zelda game I played quite some time ago while working both full time and part time jobs. Life was shitty then and I don’t recall the game. Like at all. Something about a bird and some clouds and a sword controlled by the Wiimote. I remember some of the game but it’s like a vague dream recalled hours after you wake up where you have a general idea of what happened but everything is really fuzzy. It would be nice to play again, and would be a change from that shitty Twilight Princess ordeal that I just wasn’t in the mood for.

So how did Skyward Sword go? It was awful. Apparently all the first hour of Skyward Sword is fucking cutscenes and dialogue that you cannot skip. You can’t even make the text appear quickly; it slowly types out letter after letter and there’s nothing you can do about it. Anyways, the game does this, I’m assuming, so you get involved in the plot which circles around Zelda and Links “friendship” and some fucker Gaston Groose who is jealous over the whole ordeal.

Like, whatever. You start the game and there are tutorials all over the place “disguised” as dialogue. You talk to some fucker and he makes you get a cat thing he lost. This is so you can be taught how to climb and move boxes. What a dickhead. After that you sit through about ten minutes of cutscene with you and Zelda talking and looking around at clouds. You find your flying ostrich bro is gone and discover Gaston Groose is behind it (SURPRISE!) and you have to find it. You need a sword and the game forces you through another tutorial by showing you how to get carpal tunnel syndrome from the Wiimote. Finally (rather eventually), you find the bird and the game gets underway. Except not really. Not yet. Fuck you Link: more dialogue for you to hear. You do a race, win the race, pass out, and Zelda is lost. Now is the time you get to save her! Her dad, the dude in charge of the entire village tells you to go find her, so you do. Or you try to. You walk outside your room, ready to finally start the goddamn game and some stupid-ass NPC stops you for more dialogue! He gives you a satchel he made and suggests you buy a shield. Fuck that guy, I didn’t buy a shield and took off for the world under the clouds immediately. Fuck the shield, I’ll play the entire game without one if I have to. I’ve played Bloodborne so I can fucking dodge the shitty Zelda enemies with no problem. When he stopped me and started talking I literally yelled at the TV “Can I play the fucking game yet?? Come the fuck on!”

This is the entire first hour of the game…

BUT BEFORE ALL OF THAT you have to get another sword and deal with even more dialogue. It’s such a goddamn pain. Even once you make it under the clouds there’s even more talking with some old lady and anything that is alive. I seriously played for an hour and a half without doing a damn thing.

Your sword also interrupts you every 2 minutes to say something stupid and obvious. “Do you know you don’t have a shield? That’s a bad idea. I highly suggest you acquire one before you proceed.” FUCK YOU I DON’T NEED A SHIELD FI THANKS THO. If you’re low on hearts she states the fact, rudely interrupting whatever world-saving quest you’re on. The beeping the game makes to signal you being low on health isn’t enough apparently and she has to point it out.

“…were you aware that I’m a massive pain in the ass?”

I mean it works okay the first time you play the game because it’s new and you don’t know what to expect, but fucking hell, it’s brutal sitting through a second time. Even as brutal as sitting through Skyward Sword’s introduction was there was one game that somehow topped that…

Remember Twilight Princess? And how I griped about it earlier? Yeah…That’ll be in another post in a few days because this one was surprisingly long for me to complain about a video game.